This chapter starts by summarising an experiment showing how the brain’s emotion circuitry responds to a set of words signalling threat. The main emotion activated in Brexitspeak is fear; the triggers are both linguistic and visual. They include representation of alarming scenarios, and factual misrepresentations capable of causing various negative emotions. The chapter analyses three well-known cases that illustrate such effects. The first is Vote Leave’s propaganda displayed on the side of a red bus: the slogan was an inaccurate statement that could evoke feelings of attachment, resentment and anger. This is also analysed in terms of speech acts, ambiguous and deniable assertions, and lying. The second case, the rightly controversial ‘breaking point’ poster displayed by Leave.EU had the avowed goal of emotion arousal. The visual element is analysed with reference to cognitive image schemas, and their potential for activating fear reactions. The third case, the most effective of the Vote Leave campaign, was crafted in order to prompt the fear of losing agency. This, too, likely activated the brain’s fear circuitry.

Science and central, national political structures are the two greatest modern institutional forms of authority. They can sometimes align and sometimes clash. Science and technology policy has, in the UK, been seen since the twentieth century as an important lever to encourage innovation and ultimately economic growth. Some of the most challenging issues facing politicians depend, partly, on scientific understanding and advice. This chapter reviews and assesses the experience of policy-for-science and science-for-policy under the Coalition and Conservative administrations. It is a pattern of modified continuity and the articulation of the possibility of radical change. Ultimately both, in ways that will be described, were undermined by the tumultuous events of Brexit and Covid.

From the beginning of the war, Americans were divided about their involvement in the conflict. While many hoped to preserve their neutrality, others rushed to volunteer, often in roles related to medical care or humanitarian aid. Poetry was a powerful vehicle for expressing a range of political positions, and was deliberately used to manage public opinion on America’s entry to the war in April 1917. This chapter examines the impact of war poetry on the politics and cultural attitudes of Americans in the 1910s. It also explores how the themes and motifs of the war became embedded in the subjects and methods of American poets throughout the twentieth century.

This chapter places Elizabeth Bishop’s work within the cross currents of the aesthetic and poetic movements that constituted modernism. While it might be expected that Bishop and her contemporaries such as Randall Jarrell, John Berryman and Robert Lowell would form part of the generation that would inherit the sensibilities of modernism, what quickly becomes clear, particularly in relation to Bishop, is both her reticence at being identified with any one particular school or movement and her agility in moving between the definitions produced by, and for, modernism. In part her singular position on the peripheries of modernism was a self-selected one, Bishop is happier to stand apart from the categorizing and theorizing impulses of her time. In addition, the fact that she was a gay woman